NVidia has really put a lot of emphasis on their upcoming ARM Tegra system codenamed “Kal-El”, and has slowly been leaking technical details over the last few months.  The latest tidbit came out earlier today: Details of the “fifth core” of the new design.

“Our next-generation Tegra processor, codenamed “Project Kal-El,” is widely known as the world’s first quad-core mobile chip. Today, we’re unveiling Kal-El’s little-known fifth core in two new whitepapers that detail its “Variable SMP” architecture.” said NVIDIA’s Matt Wuebbling on a blog post on the company’s website. “This extra core – which we call the “companion core” – runs at a lower frequency and operates at exceptionally low power. During less power-hungry tasks like web reading, music playback and video playback, Kal-El completely powers down its four performance-tuned cores and instead uses its fifth companion core. For higher performance tasks, Kal-El disables its companion core and turns on its four performance cores, one at a time, as the work load increases.”

So essentially they’ve added a 5th “idle” core to the system, one that operates at super-low power and has just enough horsepower to keep the system running and able to power up more powerful cores as needed.  This will be great for systems with a high idle time (like their mentioned websurfing and email) where the overwhelming bulk of time is just spent waiting for the user to do something.

via NVIDIA Reveals Kal-El’s Fifth “Companion” CPU Core – HotHardware.